Microsoft staff demand firm ends Border Patrol contractAn open letter signed by more than 100 Microsoft employees has called on the tech giant to stop its work with US Border Patrol.
The call comes as the Trump administration faces intense criticism over the separation of children from their families at the Mexican border.
The letter, posted on an internal message board and published by the New York Times, said the employees "refuse to be compli...

Tech Tent - Glued to our phonesWas this the week that we woke up to our addiction to smartphones?
That is just one of the topics we discuss in a special edition of Tech Tent live from the Cheltenham Science Festival.
This week, Apple spent quite a lot of the opening keynote speech of its Worldwide Developers Conference talking about ways to make us use the iPhone less. It introduced features which it said would allow user...

Asus 'phone with a fan' among weird gadgets at ComputexA gaming phone with a removable fan, and a dual-screen laptop are among the new gadgets on show at the Computex conference in Taiwan.
Computer giant Asus revealed a powerful handset designed for gamers that comes with a clip-on fan to keep it cool during "strenuous gaming sessions".
It also showed off new laptops with dual screens, which it plans to sell in 2019.
But rival Lenovo was crit...

Google search reveals names of rape victimsGoogle's auto-complete and related search functions are revealing the identity of rape victims who have been granted anonymity.
The issue was discovered in a Times newspaper investigation of several prominent sexual assault cases.
Searches for attackers or alleged attackers automatically reveal the names of the women they have been accused of raping.
Google said it had removed all example...

The Ocado robot swarms that pack your shoppingThe first things you notice are the chill in the air, the vast grid on the floor which makes you feel like you're on the film set of the movie Tron, and the whooshing sound of wheels skimming across aluminium.
The last thing on your mind is buying groceries.
But that's what's going on here. I'm standing upstairs in an Ocado warehouse in Hampshire, England, where grocery orders are assembled ...

Robot company Starship Technologies plans 1,000 delivery botsA company which specialises in delivery robots plans to expand its operations from two campuses to twenty by 2019 with a fleet of a thousand.
Starship Technologies is partnering with the Co-op in Milton Keynes to deliver groceries there.
It follows trials with Just Eat to deliver takeaways in South London.
One expert told the BBC he thinks it will be a long time before they become a regul...

Facebook facial recognition faces class-action suitFacebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled.
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent.
It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos; the lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law.
Facebook said the case had no ...

Superfast 5G mobiles are a step closerAn auction of frequencies for the next generation of mobile phone networks has raised £1.36bn, says regulator Ofcom.
Vodafone, EE, O2 and Three all won the bandwidth needed for the future 5G mobile internet services, which are not expected to be launched until 2020.
It is expected that 5G will provide much faster connections than the current system.
In particular, Ofcom said accessing the...

Craigslist drops dating ads after new law.Classified advertising website Craigslist has closed its dating ads section in the US, in response to a new bill against sex trafficking.
The bill states that websites can now be punished for "facilitating" prostitution and sex trafficking.
Ads promoting prostitution and child sexual abuse have previously been posted in the "personals" section of Craigslist.
The company said keeping the s...

Tech Tent: Facebook and Google police their platformsHow far should the two mightiest web giants go to police the content they enable?
This week Google acted to ban crypto-currency advertising, while Facebook banned a far-right group
Tech Tent looks at growing evidence that the social media firms are now actively editing what appears on their platforms, rather than just sitting back and allowing their users complete freedom to share any kind o...